


So Come on Home

by maplemood



Series: girl!Peter [5]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Father Figures, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Peter Quill, Gen, Kid Fic, Rule 63, Singing, Sort Of, girl!Peter - Freeform, very mild sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-19 04:39:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11890215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Escape isn’t something that just happens. When your chance comes, you’ve got to be ready to reach out and snatch it.Five times Pete could have escaped.





	So Come on Home

**Author's Note:**

> Still hard at work on "I Don't Wanna Know Your Name". After all the angst of the last chapter I just needed a bit of an emotional palate cleanser.

“No way out,” he tells her, over a million times in those first few months—those first few years. “No way out a’ this, so don’t you waste your time looking for one. You’re stuck on me now.”

“With,” Pete corrects every time, “Stuck with you. At least say it right, you dumb geezer!” And every time Yondu smacks her head or flicks her ear, tells her to mind her own goddamn business. Too bad he can’t ever seem to mind just his.

Besides, he’s wrong. Pete didn’t get to be the only girl ever kicked out of Tiny Saints Preschool without learning that there’s always a way out. Keep your eyes peeled and your mind sharp, and sooner or later an opportunity will present itself. Escape isn’t something that just happens. When your chance comes, you’ve got to be ready to reach out and snatch it.

+

The first chance comes six months in. They’re holed up, just the two of them, in a tiny, dank hotel room. Pete swallows down the thick sour sludge that builds in her throat when she remembers that “just the two of us” used to mean her and Mom sharing slices of cheesecake on their back porch, oohing at the constellations and fireflies. Now it means her and Yondu, who’s just gotten two teeth capped. Another one had to go, yanked straight out of his skull because it’d abscessed.

Yondu had to dock planetside to have the work done. Everyone else refused to watch Pete (“Don’t care what you say, that thing’s still a biter!”), so she’s spent two days sleeping on the floor (“Ain’t no way you’re stealing this bed from me,” he growled, his words muffled with packed gauze. “I’m the goddamn invalid!”), plus watching cartoons on the holo-projector and Yondu popping under-the-counter pain meds like candy.

On the third day, he runs out.

“You go get a refill,” he orders her. “And come straight back. ‘Less you want me hunting you down like a prize pig.”

“Dude,” says Pete. “You can hardly move.”

“You tryin’ to test me, Red?”

She means to run with all her heart. But first Pete decides to refill the prescription; she can get double what Yondu’s paying if she hawks it to the right people. Once she’s holding the bottle in her hand, though—first, she remembers that she’s already wanted on this planet. And then she remembers that she was the only one who came with Yondu to the back alley dentist’s (because she had to), and how, when the guy wrenched at his infected tooth, Yondu’s hand shot out and fastened to her arm, squeezing until her bones crunched.

“Took you long enough,” he snarls when she gets back. He lets her watch the holo-projector almost all night, though. He even kicks down an extra blanket for her.

Next time. Next time she’ll be out the door and long gone before he even thinks her name.

+

The second chance passes by in a haze of dingy white walls, dingy white uniforms, and a glorious, glorious, numbing drip.

“Good shtuff,” Pete slurs. “This is some _goooood_ shtuff.”

She’s ten. Is she ten? Maybe she’s twenty. Maybe she’s _forty_!

“Sho…” something’s wrong with her S’s, they just slop all over the place and she can’t stop them. “What’d I mish?”

“Broke your arm.” She hears a familiar voice say, very far away.

Pete scoffs. “ _No_ I didn’t. Shtupid.”

“Dang kid,” the voice grumbles. “Fly all night to get her this here strong stuff and what’s it do? Turn her plumb lunatic.”

“Hey! I’m right here!”

The words blur after a while, then darken; then she dreams, dreams awful things, a man who isn’t a man but a mass of swirling blue tentacles, a crumbling planet shrouded in red clouds, she screams and screams—

—jerks awake to hands on her shoulders, forcing her down, but she’s not going down, she’s not _suffocating_ —

“—Gonna rip that fancy drip out, is that what you want?”

“Mom!” wails someone who isn’t her, not quite. “ _Mom_!”

Where’s Mom where’s Mom wheresmom—

Someone is singing. Someone is singing and it’s—is it The Five Stairsteps?

Is it?

It is. Rough, stumbling, not sweet at all, kind of pissed, even, way too low, like nobody else is supposed to hear, but come on, everyone should hear this song, everyone should know that things are gonna get easier and brighter…

She sleeps again.

She wakes again, still hazy, to a pasty face bent low, asking her—what’s it asking….

“Sweetie? Honey? Is this your dad? Your real dad?”

Pete squints. Over a swell of white-swathed shoulder she sees his stupid blue face, drawn tight for some reason. She thinks, in one cold stroke, _This is it_.

“No,” Pete says.

“No?” The pasty face creases. “Are you sure, sweetie?”

_Some day when your head is much lighter…_

He didn’t sing. Yondu doesn’t sing.

_Are you sure?_

Give herself up in a hospital and they’ll send her packing straight to an orphanage. She’ll never have even a chance of getting home.

Pete shifts to look at Yondu. Finds his gaze and holds it.

“No,” she says slowly, “That’sh my mom.”

The pasty face laughs as she sinks back into sleep.

+

Third chance. It’s Pete’s twenty-first birthday. She rolls over in another dark, dank hotel room to spoon with an off-duty Nova cop.

“Baby,” he murmurs, the crown of his head nuzzled under her chin—at six-foot-two, Pete hardly ever gets to be the little spoon, not that she minds. “You know I could take you away from all this.”

“Oh, honey,” she murmurs back. “I doubt it.”

He stiffens. The cop—God, what’s his name again, Mingus?—flops over on his stomach to glare at her.

“Why do you keep sticking by them? They’re nothing to you.”

“Says the man I’ve known seven days,” Pete snaps. “Just ‘cause you give amazing head doesn’t mean you get to tell me how to live my life. I mean, maybe in a few years. But not _now_.”

“It’s that Udonta guy, isn’t it?”

Pete throws back the covers. “Shut up.”

“Just…just help me understand this, Petra.”

“Yeah, call me that again and someone else is gonna be helping you understand how I ripped your balls off.”

“What’s this hold he’s got on you?” Mingus scowls as he watches Pete scoop herself back into her stolen bra. “Because let’s see, from what you’ve told me he kidnapped you when you were a kid, when your mother was on her deathbed—”

“Man, I told you to shut up!”

“—made it so your mug’s wanted in all lawful territories, slapped you silly when you didn’t learn to pickpocket fast enough…he’s a Ravager, honey. He’s scum.”

“Thanks for clarifying.” Pete yanks on her shirt. “I have only run with them for thirteen years.”

Mingus has the brains to look semi-apologetic. “Exactly,” he says. “You’ve gotten numb to it. Hey, I can pull up Udonta’s record for you. Real eye-op—”

Pete bounces back onto the bed and straddles him. She lays a hand on his neck and squeezes. Just a touch.

“I know who he is,” she says. “All you know is how to get me off. We clear?”

Mingus nods. His Adam’s apple bobs under her palm.

“Great.” Pete lifts her hand. “If you do that trick with your tongue again and we can forget this ever happened.”

+

The real problem with Mingus is that he has a point. A very pointed point. And, really, it’s not his fault that he thinks he knows Yondu when he’s never even met the guy, and even if he did he’d still know jack-all. Pete told him all the hard stuff, the sharp things that dug deep and hurt her. Some of them still cut, and still bleed, even now.

She didn’t tell him about the softer moments, the ones that drew her back again and again. She barely tells herself about them. Those times are secrets, hers and Yondu’s, and they lie between the two of them like constantly smoldering bombs. They both skirt around them, knowing that once—not if—those bombs go off, they’ll hurt worse than anything else.

+

Her first chance came when she was eight, holed up in a tiny hotel room—

No. Wait. Even before that--

+

 _This_ was her first chance.

Pete is eight years old again. Scared to death. Angry as hell, with Yondu yanking her along by the scruff of her neck, but not angry enough to forget that she’s two seconds shy of peeing her pants in terror.

So close. She was so close.

“What I can’t figure out,” says the Ravager captain conversationally, “is ‘xactly how stupid you think I am, girl.”

Pete snarls. Yondu heaves her up, dangling Pete face-to-face while her sneakers peddle through the air. “Round these parts, your scrawny ass is always gonna stick out like a sore thumb. I ain’t never not gonna getcha back. _Never_.”

His breath stinks of meat and booze and those fat purple cigars Tullk shares with him. Pete sucks her cheeks in, collecting all the spit she can, and hawks it up, aiming for his face. Unfortunately, Mom never let her practice enough to become a champion spitter. The saliva dribbles down her own chin. Yondu’s the one who laughs in her face.

“Mercy. I’m shakin’ in my boots.”

Anger blows her fear to smithereens. “Fucker!” Pete screams, kicking. “I _hate_ you.”

He caught her in an alley lined on both sides with cinderblock walls. Yondu slams Pete down on top of one those walls so hard her tailbone rattles.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen, Red. You’re goin’ back, and you’re staying put on the ship, and maybe if you do all that right and quiet enough I won’t tell my boys where you got off to. And if you don’t—” his grin spreads wickedly. “We’re all powerful hungry.”

“Take me home!”

Yondu growls. “I gotta tell you it ain’t happening again? All you Terrans must be dumb as soup.”

Why she breaks then Pete will never know. She’s just so angry, and so tired of being angry, and she was so, so close to getting away….

“I want my Mom,” she whispers.

Yondu is, as usual, unimpressed. “Now, I don’t reckon you’ll understand this, Red, but most everybody wants somebody,” he snaps. “Don’t mean you’ll get them. Don’t mean nothing.”

A fat, hot tear dribbles down Pete’s cheek. She rubs it off furiously. “Don’t care,” she says mutinously. “I _want_ her.”

“Come on now. I know you ain’t as dumb as all that. You’re momma’s gone. Truth is, girl, you ain’t mad at me for picking you up. You’re just mad that she’s dead.”

Pete doesn’t get it, then. Why do those words calm her down, instead of pitching her into another rage? Thirteen years later, after Mingus has left and she’s mulling it over, she decides it’s because she knew that _he_ got it. Yondu understood what she was feeling, even if her own raging, bewildered brain wouldn’t let her see that.

“What you do to your hand?” he asks now, thirteen years ago. “Give it over.”

Scrabbling up then down a pile of old crates left Pete with a splinter the size of a hypodermic needle jabbed through her palm. She ignored the sting of her skin stretching white over it while Yondu was talking. Now she thrusts her hand out, only because she knows he’ll grab it anyway. She’s not screaming anymore, but Pete scowls as Yondu takes her hand in his.

“Lucky I found you when I did,” he mutters, squeezing at the splinter. Pete flinches. “This sucker gets inflamed and all, your hand’d drop right off. Quit squirmin’.”

A second later Yondu bends his head, mouth open. Pete’s heart jumps into her throat; there’s still time to kick him in the eye and take off running—crap, this time is he finally going to take a bite out of her?

His jagged teeth bite down on the head of the splinter. With one quick jerk of his chin, Yondu yanks it out.

 _Baby,_ Pete hears Mom’s voice murmur, clear as day. _Don’t you cry. It’s just a splinter._

She sniffs and rubs her cheek again. “I still hate you.”

Yondu spits out the splinter. “Cry me a damn river,” he snaps.

+

The understanding. It draws her back every time. Understanding that Yondu needed her, if only for a hot second in the dentist’s chair. Understanding that he sang to her, even if he didn’t. Understanding that he knew her anger, every in, out, and seething turn of it, because, when it comes to rage, Yondu’s practically a connoisseur. 

+

When she leaves for the last time—for good, she tells herself—Pete is thirty-four years old.

Less than a week later she calls Yondu back to her.

When she’s clinging on to Gamora, freezing out there among the stars with the breath sucked from her lungs, all Pete can think, if she thinks anything at all, is one, crushed, pulsing string of _youbettercomeyoubettercomeYonduYonduYondu_. When she chokes and gasps in the warmth of the air lock she thinks, _I knew it. I knew you’d come, you dumb geezer._ The galaxy’s given her so many chances to escape this man. One by one, she’s passed them all by.

_What’s this hold he’s got on you?_

She knows what it is. One day she’ll be ready to make peace with it.

Pete will always run straight in the other direction. Sometimes Yondu will wait, bide his time. Sometimes he’ll come chasing after her.

In the end, either works.

In the end, she always comes back.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure that this fic breaks any new ground, but forcing Pete into situations where she has to acknowledge her connection to Yondu is one of my favorite past times. 
> 
> Title comes from lyrics in "Walkabout" by Augustines.
> 
> You can find me on [ tumblr](https://mapleymood.tumblr.com/) and [ dreamwidth](https://maplemood.dreamwidth.org//). My tumblr tag for inspiration related to this series is [ here](https://mapleymood.tumblr.com/tagged/girl%21peter)


End file.
